Ann Light

Ann Light is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making. Her 25-year research career has focused on the politics, ethics and agency of design, and especially co-design in communities, exploring social activism at neighbourhood level, investigating the design of sharing structures and questioning the boundaries of participation. Regarding the social and ecological as inextricably linked, over the last few years she has turned to consider climate collapse and the stress that current systems put on the planet, believing creative remaking of relations is needed for liveable futures and looking at ways that socially engaged art and design can find potential in difficult places and offer visions of fairer worlds. She has been multiplied funded by the AHRC, EPSRC, ESRC and EU, successfully leading more than 25 UKRI projects, and worked with arts and grass-roots organizations and marginalized groups on five continents, in local, transnational and international development settings.

She draws on professional experience from the design sector and qualifications in humanities, arts, artificial intelligence and computer science. She is co-author of Designing Connected Products (O’Reilly, 2015) and has advised the EU on the sharing economy. She is co-creator of the CreaTures Framework, prepared as part of the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures and recently completed work on Social Justice in the Digital Economy, a UK platform for research into more equal societies. She also works as a visiting professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmö University in Sweden.